Privacy, Security Risks Make Government Databases a Political Battleground

In 1998, the FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a database that federally licensed gun dealers use to determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to purchase a firearm. Unfortunately, by all accounts, the data in NICS is woefully incomplete, which means that the background checks are not preventing those who shouldn’t have guns from buying them. Bad data leads to bad results, yet attempts to fix this problem have consistently run into political opposition.